


The Only Battle

by doomcanary



Series: Fine [2]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Adultery, F/M, M/M, Original Mythology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-20
Updated: 2014-03-20
Packaged: 2018-01-16 08:23:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1338640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomcanary/pseuds/doomcanary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>OK, so I was WAY late to the party in realising how popular  my other fic Fine was, but this is a sort-of sequel to it that's been kicking about on my hard drive since forever. Hope you enjoy!</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only Battle

Lancelot has known, ever since he was a boy, that there are some things you can't fight. He couldn't fight the wasting sickness that took his mother; he couldn't fight her love for his father, despite his father's coldness, and his pride. He couldn't fight his father's God, a proud cold faith to match the man who held it.

So when he came to Camelot, and found in Prince Arthur not only a man who fought beasts and battles, but also one who fought his father and his King, his whole world was shaken to the core. It began to open up; to change. He felt as if he was fighting the things he had always known about himself, drawing them into the open like foul creatures of darkness and battling them on level ground; and he felt as if Merlin and Arthur, between them, were fighting at his side. It was even Merlin who showed him a new way to love; who drew him away from vivacious Gwen and gave him an easy, sensual companionship. Everything he'd always known was falling away; he was dizzy with it, lost. He turned from Merlin to Gwen and back again in a wild confusion of possibilities. It almost didn't surprise him when he fell from the wild height he'd soared to; when Merlin's schemes collapsed and he was slung into a dungeon. It had felt so alien it could hardly have been real.

Merlin still seemed to believe in it; despite the way the first cracks in the whole thing had been in the way he treated Lancelot. Even Arthur seemed to back Merlin's faith in him, and hope flickered in him again; was the Prince really greater than his father, able to see true valour where Uther saw only tainted, peasant blood?

But great or no, Prince Arthur was not the king of Albion; the law turned upon Uther's word, not Arthur's. When Merlin came running to him as he saddled up to leave, offering hope yet again, Lancelot found himself tired, unwilling to believe it; but then, he also knew that there were battles one could fight, must fight, against darkness and injustice. It was not with fiery courage, but with quiet resignation, that he rode to stand against the Gryphon.

When blue-white fire burst forth from his lance and the Gryphon fell in a choking cloud of smoke, no longer impenetrable but a mass of burning feathers and seared flesh, just for a moment, the world opened up before him again. Just for a moment, as he met Merlin's eyes, saw the amazement and joy and understood what the boy had done, how they had come together to defeat the undefeatable – just for a moment, everything he had hoped for seemed real.

Then the fair head of the Prince beside Merlin stirred, and the boy dropped instantly to his knees, loyal as a spaniel. Lancelot rode back to them slowly, wonder swirling in him once more. When he reached them, wonder ceased, and cold certainty took its place. Merlin looked up at him, stricken with guilt; and the wounded Arthur smiled in his sleep of pain, his fingers linked to the warlock's on the bloody ground.

Lancelot had fought the gryphon for Albion and for right, but Merlin had not. Had Merlin been here when Arthur fought the beast, it would have been Arthur's blade that burned. He had fought with Lancelot because Arthur was already down; he had fought for the life of the Prince, and for love of him. And Arthur, a great prince who would be a greater king – Arthur was wise enough to know the worth of that. Wise enough to love Merlin in return. The wild power in which Lancelot had so briefly shared; that was Arthur's to wield, not his. The joy of victory, of soaring free on magic's wide wings, was a thing only the true Prince was heir to.

Lancelot was not a great man, sprung as he was from common blood and barely proven. It was not for him to cut away that magic, steal for himself a little piece of a power that could render Albion mighty. It was neither right, nor his right.

And love could not be commanded; there, at the heart of it, was the battle that he truly could not fight. What he saw in Merlin's guilty eyes and Arthur's peace, at rest beneath the hand of strong protection, was not his to share. It had been gathering all around him from the moment he came to Camelot; and lost as he had been in his own world, he'd never seen it until too late. Suddenly, he understood Merlin's seduction; the artlessness within his artifice. The power of his words had been like the immense strength of his magic; new, and coming to him on a tide of things he little understood.

“I'm sorry,” said Merlin. “I'm so sorry.”

Lancelot has fought all his life for the good of his country, and for what is right; he has fought to become what is good and right. Here, at Camelot, he has done neither of those things. Here, he has unwittingly been the rock in Albion's road to greatness; he has almost, almost come between its future King and a great sorceror, a magic that may outstrip any he has ever known. The strange – magical – bubble of potential that exists around Arthur and Merlin has confused him, made him think he can be something other than what he is.

He has forgotten the one truth of the world: that not every battle is his to fight.

“No knight can argue with the will of Fate,” says Lancelot.

The battle that will be his is to decide whether he is a knight, or merely a man.

***

“They're different, Gwen,” says Lancelot to the dark, troubled eyes of Queen Guinevere. “They're not like ordinary people; they're destined for bigger things. Merlin – well, they say Merlin's magic is more powerful than anyone's; and Arthur is the king. He's Albion, Gwen. It's in him.”

“Then what are we?” says Guinevere. “Why marry a blacksmith's daughter, if she's nothing more than a peasant?”

“I don't know, Gwen,” says Lancelot. “I remember when I first met Merlin; they believe it's not really like that. Him and Arthur – they think they can change the way it is.”

“They can, can't they? A king and a sorceror?”

“There are only so many battles you can fight.”

“What do you mean?”

“Arthur can win wars; he's got an army of men to do what he commands. He can pick up a sword and kill monsters; Merlin can defeat great sorcerors and break unbreakable enchantments. They fight for Albion, for the whole kingdom. But they can't change people's hearts. People know, Gwen; they know what it means to be royal, and what it means not to be. They love Arthur for marrying you – but they know you're still just Gwen. All the beautiful gowns and castles in the world can't change where you come from.”

Gwen's face changes. “You think Arthur did this – married me because he knew that?” she says. “Because he wanted the people to like him?”

“Arthur's not cruel, Gwen, but I don't see how he could have missed it,” Lancelot says. What he knows, and doesn't say, is that he sees in every glance and touch that passes between the King and his closest advisor an intensity of feeling that Arthur never betrays around Gwen; people praise the King for his patriotism, his will to fight for the land, but Lancelot remembers a dirty, bloody hand, closed around a pale one on Albion's dark soil. He remembers Merlin's stricken eyes, and the peace on the face of the Prince, trusting in Merlin absolutely even then. Gwen, though; Gwen is just an ordinary girl. Lancelot knows a little about courtly ways, understands how a noble lady expects to be a bargaining chip, to marry for politics and placement, not for love. Gwen isn't part of that world, and she's alone here, in this castle, this marriage. She asks Lancelot about Arthur, surprised that she doesn't talk to him, doesn't see him every day; and Lancelot wants to punch the immovable stones of the walls, punish Camelot for doing this to her.

Gwen has her back to him, looking out of the window; and after a moment he sees her trembling.

“Gwen,” he says quietly, going to her. She turns to him, and her eyes are wet with tears.

“Oh Gwen,” he says, taking her shoulders, and she sobs. He folds her into his arms, and bows his head over hers.

Gwen is just a lonely, ordinary girl; it's Arthur who is great, who moves with Merlin in that bubble of magic, of powerful potential and hidden love. Gwen is just a girl, shut outside that forever. And Lancelot has fought his battle; he laid out his challenge to the knight within himself, fought to win or lose the belief that he could shed his origins and become what Arthur and Merlin are.

Arthur knighted him again, in the glorious flush of new power; but Lancelot knows how the battle really went.

Lancelot is just a man.

***

What Merlin doesn't know about Arthur, he sometimes thinks, isn't worth knowing. He knows his prince's touch – still his prince, always his prince, even when the crown sits heavy on his head. He knows the touch of him, knows how his footsteps sound in the dark, knows the sounds of pleasure that tear themselves out of his chest and the taste of the sweat that sheens among the soft blond hairs on the nape of his neck. Until he sees the look in Arthur's eyes when he talks to Lancelot; and then, he wonders if he knows the King at all.

Lancelot is different, now; gone is that quiet intensity, the burning need to be something more. He seems to have found his own place in life; and he accepts knighthood with an attitude almost of self-deprecation. He's a legend of humility among the people, but Merlin suspects that's because these days, he doesn't believe he's a knight inside, as well as out. He doesn't talk to Merlin much – and Merlin doesn't honestly blame him, given the way they met.

But Arthur; Arthur remembers the Lancelot he first knew, and Merlin watches him trying to find it again. Merlin loves Arthur, and spends more time with him than anyone else; but Merlin's mother is still alive, still sends messages to him now and again, and Merlin's father was never a tyrant, never a cold hard man like Uther, or the father Lancelot has sometimes spoken of to Gwen. Arthur and Lancelot are alike, in a way Merlin will never know or share. And yet they're different; Lancelot's unassuming, easy way just pours salt into the wound of Arthur's royalty over and over again. Merlin watches the frustration grow in him, the dissatisfaction with being known, being a target, being never quite at ease. Arthur marries Gwen; and Merlin, for all he's cut to ribbons despite his assurances to Arthur, still realises that he's doing it because he hopes it will make him less a king. It's for that self-same reason that, when he realises the depth of his mistake, Arthur withdraws from Gwen, and comes back to Merlin, battered and ashamed.

Merlin can only forgive him. They lie in Arthur's great bed, silently entwined. He is not surprised when he sees glances begin to pass between Gwen and Lancelot; they too are alike, ordinary people in a rarefied world. Not even he is ordinary any more; he is Merlin, and his own power awes him.

Arthur does not realise Gwen's infidelity for some time. When he does, Merlin watches it shatter him, all that he hoped for finally crumbling. He doesn't think Arthur ever truly loved Gwen, not the way he loves Merlin, but she was a symbol of something to him: a dream of freedom and peace. That is the same year Mordred comes back to Camelot, and Merlin later knows it was the beginning of the end. Arthur closes down; even Merlin can barely reach him any more, and to lose Arthur to this living death is beyond his ability to cope with. That's why he's blind to Nimue's wiles; why he doesn't see the subterfuge behind her admission of defeat until too late. Why he lets himself be drawn into her eyes, her bed, her web of enchantments. It is comfort, someone at last with whom he is truly alike.

And yet he is not; because Nimue cannot love, cannot trust, not even him. It is that which betrays her, and though Merlin is too deep in her trap to escape it entirely, it is that which gives him time enough to weave one last enchantment, and a way to set it free. He hides it within his loving heart, the one piece of his soul Nimue will never willingly touch; and it will, he knows even as he sinks into enchanted sleep, save his prince from the final darkness. It will transform the living death he knows now into a true sleep, a healing and a waiting. And bring them together again, in some far distant time when the world has changed.


End file.
